Garden Planner, Nov. 24

Nov. 23, 2012

Written by

Stephanie Bruner

Special to the Register

This week

• Get bird feeders and heated bird baths set up before the snow hits.

• Poinsettias can look beautiful for weeks as long as they have bright light and consistent moisture. Keep them in a room that stays about 65 or 70 degrees in the daytime and a couple of degrees cooler at night — they’ll keep their colorful leaves longer in these conditions. If the pot is wrapped in a decorative foil sleeve, make sure to tip excess water out of it after you’ve watered the plant, so it doesn’t sit in standing water. (This will cause the roots to rot.)

• Keep working on garden cleanup! It’s best to clean up old vegetable plants and fallen fruit, and cut back the tops of peonies, bearded iris, hollyhocks and tall phlox. Rake up leaves around rosebushes, too. These tasks will keep pests and disease to a minimum next year.

• You may have heard that it’s a good rule of thumb to give plants a last drink after you eat your Thanksgiving dinner. That is a good idea, but if the weather stays warm, you’ll need to keep watering until the ground freezes. This is especially important for evergreens, which continue to lose moisture all winter through their foliage.

• Go ahead and keep buying amaryllis bulbs if you find them. Staggering the planting times means that you can have bulbs blooming for several weeks. Don’t worry if the bulbs have already started to push up some pale-green or white foliage — it’ll green up when you expose it to light. Just make sure the bulb feels heavy, not light and papery.

This month

• Don’t use commercial “shine” products, mayonnaise or oil to clean the leaves of your houseplants. They’ll look nice and shiny for a while, but over time, this lessens the plants’ ability to exchange air and moisture with the environment. Instead, wipe plants with a dampened cloth to clean them, or just put them in a cool shower for a few minutes.

Stephanie Bruner is a freelance writer in Des Moines with a degree in horticulture.